Overview
Salomon was riding a string of ridiculously successful product introductions when the brand introduced its first ski in 1989. The monocoque shell was the big story, creating such a groundswell of demand that all the ski brands that came before had to re-tool to some kind of cap ski design or risk a swift, painful death.
Salomon followed up the ski launch a few years later with an idea that continues to reap rich rewards for all brands to this day. Salomon declared that experts didn’t possess a single, monolithic skill set, but that they could be divided into 3 fields, Equipe, Force and EXP, each with its own rationale for an expert-level – and most importantly, expert-price – product. This was the moment when the market began to invert its product pyramid, to go from a base of a gazillion, low-cost package skis to a foundation built from expert skis in a minimum of 7 iterations from every supplier.
To put things in perspective, Salomon’s initiation of multiple expert ski genres has been as beneficial to the entire ski market over time as the career of Tiger Woods has been to the golf world.
Eventually, Salomon’s magic touch wore off. It looked down its Gallic nose at the arriviste shaped skis, raising eyebrows by being behind the trend for once. Its transition away from rear-entry boots wasn’t smooth, although it’s safe to say that rocky era is well behind it. Although the brand would have star products again – X Scream and Pocket Rocket come to mind – it didn’t always display its formerly flawless feel for the market. Important launches such as the BBR failed to get off the ground.
This led to a period of retrenchment during which Salomon relied on the lower cost of monocoque manufacturing to pursue a price-advantage strategy. Consumers responded well to the easy-skiing style of the Q series, but opinion leaders shied away from skis they perceived as too soft.
This takes us up to the 2016/17 season, when Salomon unveiled the QST series of off-trail-oriented skis. With a weave of carbon and flax (C/FX), Salomon finally found a formula for a lightweight ski that didn’t flop around on hard snow like a carp on a hot dock. With the QST series, the brand bid adieu to monocoque, building these models instead with square sidewalls from tip to tail. The top 3 QST’s, the 118, 106 and 99, also inserted a segment of Titanal underfoot so the edge wouldn’t wash out in ratty terrain.
In 2018/19, Salomon doubled down on C/FX, adding transverse strands to create a carbon and flax grid that makes the many models that rely on it more powerful and responsive. C/FX3 was the defining ingredient across the top of four product families: QST, QST Women’s, XDR and the Aira collection for women. The QST 106 and QST 99 also received a layer of basalt between the base and core to better withstand the battering of harbor chop.
It’s unusual to overhaul a product family’s design two years in a row, yet in 2019/20, Salomon again reconfigured its mix of basalt, carbon and flax fibers, separating out the flax into its own layer and braiding the carbon and basalt into crosshatched strands. Koroyd, a synthetic honeycomb integral to the QST design since its inception, was replaced in the tip and tail with bits of cork that Salomon assessed to be 16 times more shock absorbent than Koroyd.
And the suite of 19/20 changes didn’t stop there. Salomon also altered the shape and sidecut radius of every QST, reducing the width at tip and tail. The prior generations’ deep sidecuts had a tendency to over-steer and didn’t slice as evenly through broken snow as the new editions. The net effect was that the 2020 crop of QST’s were more directionally stable, quieter on edge and gave the pilot more control over trajectory.
While the 2019/20 QST’s were Salomon’s best off-trail collection ever, they still didn’t perform on a par with the Enforcers, Bonafides and Mantras of this world. The QST collection always prioritized light weight, so it minimized the role played by Titanal. To battle the big boys for dominance in the key All-Mountain genres, Salomon had to fight metal with metal. So, five years ago, Salomon introduced Stance, a 5-model series that added two full sheets of Titanal to the C/FX equation.
The Stances were all comfortable at speed, which is useful as their flat, narrow tails keep them close to the fall line. Their design was a hybrid of sorts: the rear was built like a Frontside ski, while the forebody had the rocker and slightly softer torsional flex associated with all-mountain models. The front end keeps them calm in crud while the rear gives them the propulsion and precision to tear through any terrain. An unexpected star in the Stance series was (and remains) the Stance 84, arguably the best value in the ginormous Frontside genre. It sheds a laminate of Titanal to make its $549 (now $649) retail possible, but the single sheet that remains still packs a wallop. It performs as well on groomers as many skis selling for $100’s more.
Four years ago, Salomon once again tinkered with its fiber formula, converting the QST 92 and QST 106 to the same, end-to-end C/FX laminate first pioneered in the QST 98. Both skis were also embellished with an extra slice of sidewall sandwich to generate more power underfoot. A lowered rocker profile created better snow contact in all conditions. These tweaks may not sound consequential, but it bears noting that both 2023 models rose in our rankings compared to the prior year, and the skis they outperformed were already very good. The latest QST 106 had the highest Power score among our top 3 Finesse finishers in 2023, which is saying a lot, considering the quality of the competition.
Two seasons ago, when there were relatively few new product designs, the across-the-board changes to Salomon’s Stance series stood out as one of the most important product renewals of 2024. Although the sidecut and camber line of the Stance 102, 96 and 90 returned intact, the connection between the top Titanal laminate and the core was tweaked to make these skis feel a bit looser. The core was also modified, replacing part of its previously all-poplar composition with a lighter-still amalgam of poplar and Karuba. The net effect was to tilt the Stance series’ bias more towards off-trail attributes, or in Realskiers’ parlance, to highlight their Finesse qualities.
The hallmark traits of last year’s Stances were their predictability in all snow conditions, reliability on edge – even on hard snow – and an almost eerie similarity in how each model skis no matter where or how you ski it. The Stance 102 stood out for its unusually easy handling for a ski this wide.
Every Salomon model that received a Recommended medallion two years ago returned unchanged for the 24/25 season. The lone notable new arrival was a Powder-specific battleship (140/116/127 @ 184cm) called the QST X. Making big, fat skis that feel maneuverable in bottomless powder has been a Salomon strong suit since the remarkable QST 118, our favorite fat ski of 2018. I don’t know where you’re going to find all the bottomless pow that would justify dropping a grand on a ski that will live most of its life in a locker, but if you want to maximize the thrill of first tracks – however rare they may be – the QST X should be on your short list of possible new powder partners.
The 2026 Season
For the 25/26 season, Salomon has once again tweaked its Frontside Stance collection as well as its venerable QST family of Freeride models. Among the QST’s, the wood core has returned to an all-popular composition, and the braided fibers are now fiberglass (the most energetic element in its make-up) blended with basalt, for a smoother ride. A patch of cork and TPU at the rocker junction in tip and tail keeps the extremities calm in the turbulent world of off-trail crud. The new QST family uses the same double-rockered, cambered baseline across the entire collection, so the only difference among all members of the QST collection are in their widths. (This hasn’t always been the case; for example, the retired QST 98 was a very different animal (of the Park & Pipe variety). The widest skis in the QST family are yet another construction, dubbed S/Lab QST, that shed weight to help offset the heft of a super-wide chassis.
One thing that hasn’t changed among the QST clan is the 106mm version remains the star product because it doesn’t ski as wide as it measures. Now that the QST 100 uses the same construction and baseline, it should compete for the affections of the skilled skier looking for a lighter ski that maintains solid snow contact in all conditions. The new QST 94 isn’t a step down from the 100’s, but a step sideways, raising the performance ante over the QST 92 that remains in the line as a package/value ski (i.e., sold with its own matching binding).
Another twist to the new QST series is its treatment of women’s models: there are none. There’s never been any difference between a men’s QST and a women’s iteration (except cosmetics), so Salomon has simply dropped all reference to gender while continuing to make two different cosmetics for every QST but the bargain basement QST 92.
The original concept behind the Frontside Stance collection was to make a more Finesse-oriented alternative to the Power-obsessed All-Mountain models from the likes of Völkl, Blizzard and Nordica. The top two models in the 25/26 Stance clan, the Pro 96 and Pro 90, still use two sheets of Ti around a Karuba/Poplar core, but the rest of the line (Pro 86 and Pro 82) reduces the metal quotient and switches to a full poplar core. Even the humble Stance 84 – note the elision of the “Pro” – still uses a single Ti insert, making it one of the best values in the current market, at $699.95 with a binding.
Tight-radius carving skis have been a fixture on European pistes since the Carving craze kicked off in the mid-1990’s, but the archetype is by and large absent from the American market. There are several signs that this pattern is changing, a mini-trend led by models like the Salomon Addikt. The flagship Addikt, the Pro 66, borrows a racing sidecut from Sally’s World Cup SL, and pairs it with a new technology that fuses a flexy polymer into the top Ti laminate, making the ski livelier and more playful. When applied to the Addikt’s distinctive split-tail design, the polymer pads make the tail 5% softer, accentuating smoothness and agility over raw power. While it’s hard to predict if the Addikt design will attract a faithful following on this side of the pond, it’s encouraging to see Salomon still has the R&D initiative to undertake bold projects.